New Season of Film & Philosophy at Filmhouse Edinburgh
When you make a choice, are you stepping freely into an open future - or just reciting lines from a deterministic script written by someone else?
Film & Philosophy returns to Filmhouse Edinburgh with three films that interrogate questions of free will and determinism from strikingly different angles. Taken together, they form a loose philosophical journey through physical causality, social conditioning, and psychological compulsion - three forces that quietly govern the choices we think we make.
The season begins on Tuesday 6 October with Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, Tom Tykwer, 1998) using Lola’s kinetic, branching sprint across Berlin to explore classical determinism and whether human agency can ever break the chain of cause and effect.
On Tuesday 3 November, we move on to Dogtooth (Kynodontas, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009), shifting the lens to environmental and linguistic conditioning to question how profoundly our morals, desires, and conceptual boundaries are determined by the structures that enclose us.
We conclude on Tuesday 8 December with Hidden (Caché, Michael Haneke, 2005), turning inward to psychological determinism to ask whether we can ever claim genuine moral autonomy while remaining blind to the buried guilt and subconscious drives that steer our actions.
Across these three films, human freedom appears not as a given certainty, but as something continually hemmed in by physical laws, social conditioning, and the
subconscious mind. Rather than offering definitive answers, the season creates a space for reflection and conversation, using cinema as a shared point of departure.
Each screening will be introduced by James Mooney (University of Edinburgh) and will be followed by an open, informal discussion. No prior knowledge of philosophy is required - the discussions are designed to be accessible and grounded in the experience of watching the film together.
Tickets now available to book in-person at the Filmhouse box office or online via the website.
